Easy to use, cost effective, excellent support
May 07, 2021
Easy to use, cost effective, excellent support
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Linode
It's used by a division that makes commercial SaaS software and is used to host the commercial software product and the test and development environments for it as well.
- The documentation is excellent, especially as it covers not just how to use Linode but how to work with Linux, Apache, Nginx, etc.
- It's sooooo much easier to do things in Linode than similar tasks in AWS. The structure of how the service works and the representation of it within the UI is simple and really easy to understand.
- The ticket/notification system is quite good. I like combining notifications about server events (rebooted, etc.) with support conversations.
- I'd like to see Linode offer S3-like file storage.
- There's a bit too much maintenance, scheduled and otherwise, that I've experienced, especially stuff that requires server migration that takes far too long for large servers. Most recently in order to not have excessive downtime I was compelled to do my own migration on a rushed time schedule in order to avoid Linode's mandatory downtime for a migration.
- I'd like Linode to be FedRamp certified.
- Linode's server options have been able to scale along with my business as we've gone from a single tiny server running both Apache and MySQL for two small SaaS products to our now 1TB+ databases, load-balanced web servers, testing and staging environments, etc.
- Linode is incredibly cost effective. Our Linode costs are less than 1% of revenue. Over the time period that our revenue went up 3x our Linode costs have increased by 1.5x at most.
Linode is far simpler to use than AWS. Digital Ocean is roughly comparable but the simplicity and customer support of Linode along with roughly equivalent cost kept me with Linode vs. going to Digital Ocean.
The cost is completely negligible compared to the benefit we have been able to derive from it. We've never had to go out to external contractors for help in managing our servers as it's been easy enough through Linode.
Uptime is quite important and Linode's uptime is acceptable, but is one of the few places I'd like to see improvement. Over the ~8 years I've used Linode there have been quite a few instances of "emergency maintenance" on my servers with very little forewarning. However usually the downtime in those cases is quite short, 15-30 minutes at worst.
In recent years the incidence of "emergency maintenance" have gone to almost zero, though there have still been several planned maintenance windows that would result in long downtime because they involved a server migration. When moving a multi-terabyte server at the rate of 3-5 GB per minute that's not really an acceptable amount of downtime. That said, because these maintenance periods are scheduled several weeks in advance I have been able to take action to migrate independently and avoid any downtime.
In recent years the incidence of "emergency maintenance" have gone to almost zero, though there have still been several planned maintenance windows that would result in long downtime because they involved a server migration. When moving a multi-terabyte server at the rate of 3-5 GB per minute that's not really an acceptable amount of downtime. That said, because these maintenance periods are scheduled several weeks in advance I have been able to take action to migrate independently and avoid any downtime.